Stamps Profiles

Philip Glass

Profile:

Born in Baltimore, Philip Glass was honored as a Stamps Distinguished Visitor during the 2007-2008 season at the University of Miami Frost School of Music for his tremendous accomplishments as an award winning composer.

Glass is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School. In the early 1960s, Glass spent two years of intensive study in Paris, while earning money by transcribing Ravi Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation. Upon his return to New York, he applied these Eastern techniques to his own music.

By 1974, Glass had a large collection of new music for his performing group, The Philip Glass Ensemble, and for the Mabou Mines Theater Company, which he co-founded. This period culminated in Music in Twelve Parts, followed by the landmark opera, Einstein on the Beach, created with Robert Wilson in 1976. Since Einstein, Glass has expanded his repertoire to include music for opera, dance, theater, chamber ensemble, orchestra, and film. His score for Martin Scorsese’s Kundun received an Academy Award nomination while his score for Peter Weir’s The Truman Show won him a Golden Globe. His film score for Stephen Daldry’s The Hours received Golden Globe, Grammy, and Academy Award nominations, and won a BAFTA in Film Music from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

In 2004, Glass premiered his new work, Orion, a collaboration between Glass and six other international artists, in Athens as part of the cultural celebration of the 2004 Olympics in Greece, as well as his Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Omaha Symphony Orchestra. Glass’ latest symphonies, Symphony No. 7 and Symphony No. 8, premiered in 2005 with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. and Bruckner Orchester Linz at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, respectively. Several highly anticipated works will be unveiled this year, including an opera about the end of the Civil War entitled Appomattox and Book of Longing.